How Victorian communities are recovering from Black Saturday

Kinglake resident Kate Jones shares stories, insights, and opinion about life after the fires with guest commentary from bushfire survivors located around Victoria.

The Kindness of Strangers

posted October 9, 2009 , 12:16

This is my last blog post and I want to share with you some small memories of the little things that people did the day disaster hit our home. I write this with sadness and dedicate it to all those that didn't make it out on February the 7th, 2009.

My first idea when I drove the kids out of Kinglake towards the Melba highway was to head to Lilydale, an outer suburb of Melbourne, and then continue on towards the city away from the threat stalking us in the bush. There seemed to be hundreds of cars coming towards us so I pulled over afraid that we were actually heading into danger not away from it. A man from a wedding party, also fleeing, suggested we join them, and search for a safe haven. Yarra Glenn was already on fire so the steady stream of cars were all now heading north of the city, back towards Glenburn and Yea. No one knows where Glenburn is. It's nothing more than a servo and a pub, but that was where my car overheated pooling green liquid on the hot ground. I made a quick decision to flag down another motorist. Many of the cars were so packed with possessions they couldn't fit us in until a young couple squeezed the three of us into the backseat, along with their fishing rods and took us onto Yea.

These lovely people were lucky that they had already left Marysville, where they had gone for the weekend to escape the oppressive Melbourne heat. They left us in the main street of town, where we wandered bewildered and hot, up to a relief centre that had been opened on the Yea football oval. It was a week before the road to Glenburn opened again and we could go and check out my car. Later that night a man turned up with his kids, deeply in shock. Like us, his car had broken down on the way out of Kinglake and cars with empty seats had passed by them. In his pain he couldn't accept this. He walked around asking the same question time and again to random survivors. "Would you drive past kids, leave them to burn? People drove past us, would you do it?" Enveloped in fear he had forgotten that someone had picked them up. Someone had opened their hearts to his family.

A man at the relief centre gave his newly acquired caravan to a family with a young baby who had lost their house. Smoke blanketed the town, and in the early hours of Sunday morning, a lady I had never met drove my son to the hospital because he was asthmatic and his breathing sounded laboured to me. We had all evacuated without our mobile phone chargers. On Sunday chargers for almost every type of phone appeared on a table in the relief centre.

I had stopped my husband, who was at work, from leaving Melbourne to come and pick us up. People were dying in cars, the roads were not safe. Consequently we stayed in Yea for a week, waiting for the roads to reopen so we could go and check out my car. The pub put us and a number of other families up for nothing, not even charging the Rural Housing service, a Government funded organisation.

After settling in I went out to sit on the pub's big wide verandah that overlooked the main street. I was joined by a guy who was working on the north-south pipeline (all works had been shut done for the week). He had been heading home to see his girlfriend down on the peninsula when he turned around, much to her chagrin, and came back to support the survivors. He gave me a beer out the fridge and listened to my spaced out ramblings into the early hours of the morning, along with a couple more beers. By this time I had barely any sleep for three days. He told me the booze in the fridge was for us. So reluctant was I to accept charity I left a twenty dollar bill under a six pack. Three days later, when I saw that the money was still there, I picked it up and put back in my wallet. This disaster has somehow changed everybody it touched.

Since February there has been an earthquake in Italy, floods in the Phillipines, a tsunami in Samoa and earthquakes in Sumatra. Because humanity has populated almost every corner of the globe, every natural disaster claims lives, homes and in some instances cities. Indonesia sent two million dollars to help us recover, we are now sending money, medical teams and aid to them. We will have to accept that rebuilding after natural disasters is as much a part of life on this planet as building cities, cars, planes and power stations. And to risk sounding like a Buddhist we need to acknowledge that nothing is permanent, not our houses nor or our towns or even our lives. To open our hearts to the needs of others helps us see that the acquisition of material wealth is not all that there is, each compassionate act somehow bestows greatness on us and makes each life more precious.